Guitar finished!

The finished guitar.

Rosette

Fingerboard - MOP inlays - maple bindings

Maple endcraft - ebony w/ abalone dot endpin. Bone w/ abalone dot endpins.

Back w/ decorative centerstrip. Maple heelcap




















Slotted headstock - MOP inlays - StewMac golden age tuners.

Gluing the Bridge and setting up

Locating the bridge. My cat is supervising the process.

Sanding the bottom of of the bridge to match the domeshape of the soundboard

Scraping the shellac off prior to gluing the bridge

 Bridge clamping caul. Since I don´t have any clamps that could reach the bridge area through the soundhole, I saw this solution online. Simple and effective.

The bridge being glued.

Shaping the bone nut.

Polishing the frets

 The strings are on and the guitar is ready to make music.

My buddy Anders giving the guitar a test drive in front of the fireplace.

French Polish

Before I started to french polish the guitar, I bought Robbie Obrien´s online course in french polishing. I definitely recommend this, if you haven´t tried it before like me. The course goes through all the steps in finishing a guitar.

Mixing up the Shellac. I chose to got with blonde shellac instead of super blonde, since i wanted to add a bit of yellow to the spruce top to age it abit. You can´t get grain alcohol i denmark without a permit, so I went with bioethanol after doing some research.

I love to do tests. Here i tested how the spruce would look with about 3 rounds of blonde shellac and a few rounds of orange shellac. Thats the raw spruce on the right. I really like the look of the mixed shellac. Looks nice and aged.

A test on the rosewood. Nice and glossy!

             Big sanding day! Alot of sandpaper and dust... peew.

Grain filling the rosewood. I used the Colortone Grainfiller from Stewmac. I gave it 2 times, but it didn´t seem to fill the grain completely so bought some pumice to take care of the rest and it worked. I gave it a few washcoats of shellac before. Its my fat cat in the back... he likes to hang around the workshop sometimes.

Using pumice to fill the grain after the grainfiller. Very good result! But it takes a lot longer.

The back finished. Looking good!! I think the cat approved it :)

Sides done.

Soundboard done.

The full guitar done. Yipiii!

The Pyramid Bridge

Laying out the bridge 

Routing the saddleslot with the Dremel tool

Cutting groves for the pyramids with the Dremel

Shaping the pyramids with chisels and sandpaper

The finished Bridge

The Neck part II

Next step was to glue the fingerboard to the neck. I made some locating pins from paperclips, so make sure that the fingerboard wouldn´t slide around once the glue was applied. This glue-up has to be very accurate.

Fingerboard glued and clamped.

Shaping the neck to match the fingerboards taper using a blockplane and chisels.

Shaping using a spokeshave..

Beautiful mahogany shavings. It smelled really good aswell!

Shaping the neck with a rasp. It has a pronounced V-neck taken from the plans.

Checking if my chisel is still sharp. Yep - its still sharp.

The neck pretty much done. I just need the final sanding.

Installing the frets. Since its a bound fingerboard, I had to remove the frettang from both ends of the frets. The frettang nippers you can buy a luthier supplies stores are really expensive, so I made one my self from a nibbler tool that i bought on ebay. I had to modify it slightly by cutting a grove in it with my dremel. I saved around 400 DKK on this. You can watch a tutorial on how to make a frettang nibbler here.

Neck done and looking good!

Before the neck was glued to the body, I made sure that it was set with all the correct angles.

The neck being glued to the body.

Levelling the frets.

The Fingerboard

Planing the ebony to thickness and trueing up one of the sides, so its ready to have the frets layed out.

Here i´m trying to plan how the inlays should be layed out. I really like the inlay styles of the Larson Brothers and other american luthiers from the same era, so I want to do something simliar. Most of the inlays I bought cut out, but some of them i cut myself using a jewellers saw.

Sawing the fret slot. I triple checked all the mesurements before. 

My new workshop in our new house! Please note the lamp. Winters are very dark in denmark, so I use this UV-lamp, that helps me not to get too depressed due to the lack of sunlight. And its actually a nice working light too.

Routing the inlay cavities.

All the inlays glued in and sanded flush. 

Maple bindings being glued on.

Fingerboard done. It has a 16" radius.